Welcome Anvil Academic

Digital publishing is increasingly becoming one of the most pressing issues in academia. One of the biggest obstacles facing digitally-born scholarship is, of course, legitimacy.

But large steps are being made.

The 2011 issue of the MLA’s journal Profession had an entire section on Evaluating Digital Scholarship. The six essays compiled for the entire are all available, open access, at the issue’s website. In the spring, the MLA officially standardized a format for citing Tweets.

A Tweet chat with Adeline Koh and the Chronicle of Higher Education’s ProfHacker group created quite some buzz this week, especially around what the “post-monograph” means.

While some of the details provided online are still a bit vague, Anvil’s strategies look promising, offering an approach to the very aspect needed to legitimize such innovative methods of scholarship: peer review. Moreover, they support open-access and encourage collaboration, outlined by Lisa Spiro (who serves at Program Manager at Anvil), as among the core values shared amongst most scholars working in the digital humanities. We are all aware of the practical problems related to funding, but Anvil, too, offers potential business models and publishing infrastructures to confront these issues.

For those interested in digital scholarship and publishing, Anvil Academic is a site to start watching.